Reich Association of German Broadcasters
The Reich Association of German Broadcasters e. V. (RDR) was an interest group founded in 1930 and dissolved in 1936, which campaigned for a national socialist radio in Germany. Your association organ Der Deutsche Sender appeared weekly from January 1930 to July 1936.
history
Initial democratic structure
The association emerged from the environment of the German national media entrepreneur Alfred Hugenberg . The register of the Berlin-Charlottenburg district court shows August 12, 1930 as the official founding day of the “Reich Association of German Broadcasters” with board members Alfred Walther Kames, Goetz Otto Stoffregen and Hans Fritzsche under number 6270 . Initially, the aim of the association was moderate: they wanted to counter the interest organizations of the center - left -minded listeners with a right- wing, German-national weight. The supervisory authority for the German radio stations, the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft , saw this as a legitimate attempt by the fee payers to exert moderate influence on the programming.
The National Socialists initially only played a subordinate role in the association. Among the nine board members of the RDR at the beginning of 1931, only one NSDAP representative, Horst Dreßler-Andreß , was practically without influence. In order to gain more weight, the NSDAP founded a "National Socialists Association Group" in the early autumn of 1931 with the aim of ensuring that from here "a uniformly defined and disciplined will to conquer the Reich Association for a national revolutionary broadcasting policy" began, i.e. an undermining of the largely democratically occupied RDR On November 1, 1931, the association group published the first edition of its monthly magazine Deutsch der Rundfunk (motto: "Break the red radio terror!"). While the "National Socialists Association" was active within the Reich Association, party members selected by the NSDAP, particularly radio-savvy and technically savvy, took care of the groundwork on site. These "radio control rooms" brought together information from the individual broadcasters that was of key importance in the preparation of the general meeting on December 19, 1931.
General assembly 1931 with scandal
The “National Socialists Association” called a general assembly after seeing the majority of the members on their side. Shortly after the start of the event on December 19 at 3 pm in the “ Hotel Prinz Albrecht ” there was a scandal over a matter of rules of procedure. “During the interruption of the meeting, the National Socialists negotiated with the representatives of the Stahlhelm and the German Nationalists. [They] called for the reorganization and replacement of the board of directors, ”wrote NSDAP party member Heinz von Fehrentheil in 1934 in“ Rundfunk im Aufbruch ”. "After the reopening of the meeting, the head of the National Socialists' group, Pg. Eugen Hadamovsky , announced that the conditions had been created to transform the Reich Association of German Broadcasters into the campaign organization of the national opposition under active leadership." The General Assembly ended with the result that all moderate forces had been elected from the RDR board, the NSDAP provided the new chairman and the two executive board members; otherwise there were only two members of the Stahlhelm and one member of the German National People's Party on the board .
On March 19, 1932, the board of directors replaced the three non-NSDAP members with party comrades in a further general meeting and adopted new statutes “which carried the idea of the leader in itself”. The organ of the association, Der Deutsche Sender , reported almost 100,000 members in March 1932 - an increase of twice that "within a very short time". The RDR celebrated its first great success: On June 14, 1932, a National Socialist spoke for the first time on German radio. "Soon we had fought the microphone free for other leading party comrades".
Goebbels as chairman of the association
The RDR reached the peak of its importance with the general assembly on October 10, 1932, again in the "Hotel Prinz Albrecht": Joseph Goebbels , the head of propaganda of the NSDAP, personally took over the chairmanship. Goebbels' acidic writing style had already shaped the comment columns of the association magazine Der Deutsche Sender . He rarely revealed himself as an author. On November 2, 1932, three months before Adolf Hitler's " seizure of power ", Goebbels dissolved the lobby group within the RDR, the "National Socialists' Association", and announced in the RDR in-house magazine what he did a few months later: “The National Socialist idea [...] should penetrate and grasp the German people completely. To this end, radio is our most important weapon today, because it accompanies and guides our national comrades from morning to night [...]. "When the goal is achieved," we will use this revolutionary weapon to prove to the world what German spirit and German will is capable. ”In order to prepare technically for taking over the radio in the event of Hitler’s election victory, the Reich Association set up an“ artist service ”, a training facility for journalists and actors loyal to the NSDAP. The participants learned the "funkically effective processing of their lecture topics", they should learn a "sense of sound" and "the feeling for our mother tongue". "Choirs, audio sequences and broadcast games" were rehearsed during the training. The artist service of the RDR also asked musicians and writers “German spirit and blood” to participate in future radio.
Propaganda topics and seizure of power
In the months leading up to the “ seizure of power ”, the RDR's propaganda revolved around three populist themes: the radio landscape was saturated with “Jewish-Marxist”, and the stations were mainly Jews . Second, broadcast officials made far too much money and embezzled the license fees. Thirdly, Marxists bombed radio stations and set up jammers . The association tried to underpin this rumor with the thesis that the left sees how the right is gradually taking over German broadcasting and is now practicing desperate, violent resistance. For the NSDAP this was a vehicle to set up an “effective Reichsfunkhilfe” with “radio police raid commandos” and “Schutzstaffeln from the personnel of the broadcasting houses”, thus a “Reichsfunkschutz”.
For the National Socialists, the intensive examination of radio and, as a goal, its instrumentalization for one's own ideas was part of the concept of a modern election campaign and later state propaganda strategy. "We want to carry the Fiihrer's word to the last corner of the German earth and bring the radio into every house," Goebbels wrote in 1933 in the association's magazine. When Hitler “seized power” in early 1933, the popular mood and the expertise of the RDR bore fruit: on the same evening, January 30, 1933, people heard a report about the torchlight procession. The complete restructuring of the radio did not take long afterwards, but took place within a few weeks.
In 1936, the radio was long in Germany into line , the order of the Reich Association of German radio listeners e. V. had done himself and the bandage dissolved. The association organ Der Deutsche Sender went into the magazine of the Reichsrundfunkkammer NS-Funk .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Heinz von Fehrentheil: From history and organization of the RDR . In: Broadcasting on the move . Handbook of the German radio 1934 with radio calendar . Schauenburg, Lahr 1934, DNB 012021741 , p. 12 .
- ↑ Hans Jürgen Koch , H. Glaser : All ears . A cultural history of radio in Germany . Böhlau, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-412-13503-8 , pp. 91 .
- ↑ M. Weiß: Why "Reich Association of German Broadcasters?" In: The German broadcaster . The national radio magazine . Vol. 3, No. 12 , 1932, ZDB -ID 548722-5 , p. 2-3 .
- ↑ von Fehrentheil 1934: p. 20.
- ↑ a b Der Deutsche Sender, 46/1932, page 4.
- ↑ von Fehrentheil 1934: p. 17.
- ↑ von Fehrentheil 1934: p. 21.
- ^ Eugen Hadamovsky : Appeal of the RDR . In: Archives for radio law . tape 7 , no. 3 , 1934, ZDB -ID 530239-0 , p. 83 f .
- ↑ The German broadcaster . DNB 013010352 . → NS radio . DNB 013056360 .